Why does everyone think they have to stack one stat over everything else?
Blizzard changed the game a long time ago so some classes can benefit equally from different stats. Mastery and Haste are both good for Holy and crit isnt completely terrible anymore but i wouldnt go out of your way to get it. You need good regen from spirit and Int is as always a priority. It's not like DPS where you HAVE to do maximum HPS, its about creating a good balance between your HPM, regen and HPM(Healing per mana)

there is also little point in arguing Holy vs Disc because both have uses. With Holy Lightwell is great, CoH is awesome, Guardian spirit can save wipes, you can quickly change from being an awesome raid healer to being a tank healer. Disc is a great tank healer, bubbles are great, Pennance is good, Pain suppression and Power Infusion are good too.

Is it any wonder that top raid guilds use all 3 types of priests? Stop aruging about it and just choose what you enjoy the most.

Holy works perfectly fine with a resto druid, hell I heal with 2 of them on the 3 healer fights sometimes.
You know what works with druid HoTs? EoL

You know what really screws over druids? Topping the raid up so fast with PoH that their hots are rendered moot.

Don't buy into the "respec disc" rhetoric. There is a time and a place for everything, and raid comp may very well dictate a greater need for a Disc priest. But it is by no means necessary unless you are rolling three holy priests or something.

I personally stack mastery. Sure the little healing ticks every second could seem wimpy. But overall the ticks from my mastery are decently large chunk of my healing. Personally i don't look at healing per second, but overall healing done. The Echo of Light may not be apparent in helping you, but in the long run, Echo of Light puts up some good numbers throughout the fight. Its even pretty useful with tank healing. a good 50k+ crit from greater heal adding around an extra 2k tick a second plus renew ticks is nice.

Although I've been won over to your side by experimenting, (ie you are right. disc outperforms in most comps atm)

The person you were responding to simply said holy becomes worse when sharing raid heals with a druid.
This is 100% true and the thing that pushed me to experiment with disc in the first place.
I don't think I've discussed this topic on mmo-c before but I wish to defend his point.

By necessity, because of the imprecise nature of HoT healing, druids have been given enough mana gain to spam. Since some of their hots taper, and others are smartheals, it makes even more sense for them to precast and follow up AoE with heavy spam. Holy priest healing is about cutting activity time to save our casts for when they will hit with low overheal - as a result, our HoTs build up to their peak right after the raid is topped off. Maybe 30% of the druid's hot overheals, while >50% of my Echo overheals. Bad. The druid can afford his overall 40% overheal, where I am struggling with mana overhealing ~25%.

To answer the OP, holy mastery boosts your raw throughput by significantly more than haste. But it doesn't really work because during AoE spam a huge amount of Echo will overheal. IE, HST is actually better (by a fair margin) in most cases.

Holy still has higher sustainable spike AoE (holy word short cooldown vs PI long cooldown) and frankly better AoE efficiency. Maybe near the end of this content we will see holy make a comeback. Maybe in 2 healer 10 man comps/5 healer 25 man comps? We will see.

Archangel/atonement (popularly referred to as AA builds) is one of two viable disc spec flavors. But your way of using it usually only works for overgeared content. Smite spam is relatively equivalent to heal spam in throughput, and may just keep a tank alive if you all overgear the content. But in raids and more demanding heroics it really won't really cut it.

For raids, if you do take AA, you typically take it to boost your penance spell. By throwing in a Holy Fire every now and then(which provides a decent smart heal), you can build evangelism stacks which really increase your penance output. Just don't let that evangelism stack fall off. And you can always consume the evangelism stack for a nice +healing booster when the manure hits the fan.

I'm honestly not a big fan of it, but it works out well if you are able to give it the extra attention it requires.

Ok, thanks for your replies everyone. It made holy healing aspec a bit more clear for me.

BTW, what about Disc healing? Is lt still based around Smite spam?

Disc healing is all about shielding low health people so ur druid buddy's hots can heal him up without risk of random aoe (assuming there is some) killing him. Oh and then lots of tank healing due to current encounter design. Smite healing right now is something you do when healing required is low.

Danner, again missing the small details. Evangelism only increases the damage of your Penance.

while this is true, it's still a good idea to ceep the 5 stacks up (until you need them) because it does reduce the manaxost of penance making it even more efficient :-) And Holy Fire is a great "heal" with 5stacks up in terms of hpm